Kate Moss Breakdown: Shoot Led To Anxiety

Kate Moss is one of the most famous models in the world, breaking onto the scene in the ’90s and creating a “look” which swept the runways and the nation: “heroin chic”. She was slight, pale, and always appeared on the verge of either passing out or leaving the room out of sheer boredom. She was an “it” girl for an entire generation…but through it all, she was struggling with severe anxiety that began with a topless photo shoot when she was just 16. It was only made worse when she did the infamous shoot with Mark Wahlberg in 1992.

“It didn’t feel like me at all,” she said. “I felt really bad about straddling this buff guy. I didn’t like it. I couldn’t get out of bed for two weeks. I thought I was going to die. I went to the doctor, and he said, ‘I’ll give you some Valium,’ and (photographer) Francesca Sorrenti, thank God, said, ‘You’re not taking that.’ It was just anxiety. Nobody takes care of you mentally. There’s a massive pressure to do what you have to do. I was really little, and I was going to work with Steven Meisel. It was just really weird — a stretch limo coming to pick you up from work. I didn’t like it. But it was work, and I had to do it.”

Moss says her infamous courtship with actor Johnny Depp proved to be the thing that helped her the most; though the relationship was often volatile, she says he was a stable presence for her in many ways.

“There’s nobody that’s ever really been able to take care of me. Johnny did for a bit. I believed what he said,” Moss said. “Like if I said, ‘What do I do?,’ he’d tell me. And that’s what I missed when I left. I really lost that gauge of somebody I could trust.”

The supermodel opened up quite a bit about Depp, saying he taught her a lot about fame.

“I was lucky to be with Johnny…he told me ‘never complain, never explain’,” she said. “That’s why I don’t use Twitter and things like that. I don’t want people to know what is true all the time and that’s what keeps the mystery.”